Monday, October 31, 2011

Re: Mapping shortcuts

This is a great thread -- I'm all about using the manual and help when I can, but I agree, most software that has substantial documentation and is complex has a help structure that is often hard to understand... I bet a lot of people would be grateful if someone would make a "How to use the documentation effectively" page for vim... I'd offer, but I really don't know it yet, but would love to read and learn from it...

Matt

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 5:56 PM, AK <andrei.avk@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/31/2011 05:43 PM, Tony Mechelynck wrote:
On 31/10/11 22:03, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:
[...]
The problem is sometimes that it's too complete, and isn't organized by
the person who's looking for the information (naturally). Google often
cuts through that problem (e.g. by allowing synonyms that the help
writer didn't consider, or terms that aren't fully correct).
[...]

Yes, the Vim help is as complete and as accurate as is humanly possible,
but sometimes it presents a needle-and-haystack problem. This, however,
has been greatly alleviated, first (in Vim 6.2 IIRC) by the :helpgrep
command, and later (Vim 7.x) by the helphelp.txt helpfile, which
centralizes all "help on searching help" (except the short summary found
by hitting F1) in a single place. Hence the "must read" in my previous
post.

And I'll add here: even if you do find something which seems relevant
about Vim by Googling or by searching the Wikipedia, always check it
afterwards with the online help, where you may find that your Google
info is perhaps slightly out-of-date, or omits just the corner case
which is giving you problems now.


Best regards,
Tony.


Vim needs a built-in google-like search. Type a few words, get
a list of entries, best matches on top.

helpgrep is not nearly the same thing - it's linewise, not
topic-wise, and it needs exact match, not synonym/tag match;
and out of the box, it does not easily do AND and OR searches
matching any order of words.

Basically, the idea is, "Are you already a vim expert and
know exactly the command you need? Boy, do we have a really
great tool to help you find it!"

Vim has a really great help system.. one of the best help
systems I've used... for ~2-3,000 lines of content. Unfortunately,
it has 130,000 lines of help.

 -ak


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